DI on Android (Kotlin) using an SPI
Most developers are intimately familiar with what an API is. However, mention SPI, and many will look like a question mark. This blog entry explains what it is, discusses its merits/shortcomings and shows how it can serve as a simple Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection pattern on Android for providing testing mocks. So what is an SPI anyway? The term SPI is an abbreviation of Service Provider Interface , and it's nothing more than a contract (interface) with pluggable implementations (classes) discovered lazily at runtime. I have also seen this pattern referred to as Service Locator and Service Registry. It likely has a older history than I am aware of (you can use it if you have introspection and reflection available in your language) but I made its acquaintance with Java 1.3 which introduced these service providers as a way of facilitating loosely coupled modules. In Java 6 the pattern was embraced further by the addition of the SericeLoader class and whenever you...